Radical Civility

Ohio churches’ activity prompts complaints to IRS

By Tim Jones
Chicago Tribune national correspondent
Published April 30, 2006

LANCASTER, Ohio — A new and unofficial verse to the 19th Century hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” is being sung in Ohio, where religious leaders are marching as to political war — against each other — in advance of Tuesday’s primary.

The schism that has divided the state’s diverse religious community involves complaints filed with the Internal Revenue Service against churches, a conservative Republican candidate for governor and a growing list of religious-based non-profit groups formed to mobilize potentially millions of Ohio churchgoers in this election year.

The confrontation has generated larger questions about the intersection of religion and partisan politics. It has also changed the tone of political discourse, suggesting the ministerial robes are coming off.

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Clergy Members Are Pressing the IRS to Investigate Whether Partisan Support Violated Tax-Exempt Status

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; A03

In a challenge to the ethics of conservative Ohio religious leaders and the fairness of the Internal Revenue Service, a group of 56 clergy members contends that two churches have gone too far in supporting a Republican candidate for governor.

Two complaints filed with the tax agency say that the large Columbus area churches, active in President Bush’s narrow Ohio win in 2004, violated their tax-exempt status by pushing the candidacy of J. Kenneth Blackwell, who is the secretary of state and the favored candidate of Ohio’s religious right.

The clergy members said the churches improperly held political activities and allowed Republican organizations to use their facilities.

The goal of the challenge is “for these churches to stop acting like electioneering organizations,” said the Rev. Eric Williams, pastor of North Congregational United Church of Christ. “I don’t want to harm or demonize these churches. I want these churches to act legally.”

When three months passed without public evidence that the IRS had acted on a January complaint, the clergy members filed a second document, expanding the allegations.

“You have flagrant intervention continuing and no indication of IRS activity,” said Marcus Owens, a lawyer for the group and former director of the IRS office that regulates tax-exempt organizations. He considers the evidence of wrongdoing “pretty overwhelming” and suspects favoritism, which tax agency officials deny.

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MY wife lost her health,
And dwindled until she weighed scarce ninety pounds.
Then that woman, whom the men
Styled Cleopatra, came along.
And we—we married ones
All broke our vows, myself among the rest.
Years passed and one by one
Death claimed them all in some hideous form,
And I was borne along by dreams
Of God’s particular grace for me,
And I began to write, write, write, reams on reams
Of the second coming of Christ.
Then Christ came to me and said,
“Go into the church and stand before the congregation
And confess your sin.”
But just as I stood up and began to speak
I saw my little girl, who was sitting in the front seat –
My little girl who was born blind!
After that, all is blackness!

– From Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1916)

HERE lies the body of Lois Spears,
Born Lois Fluke, daughter of Willard Fluke,
Wife of Cyrus Spears,
Mother of Myrtle and Virgil Spears,
Children with clear eyes and sound limbs –
(I was born blind).
I was the happiest of women
As wife, mother and housekeeper,
Caring for my loved ones,
And making my home
A place of order and bounteous hospitality:
For I went about the rooms,
And about the garden
With an instinct as sure as sight,
As though there were eyes in my finger tips –
Glory to God in the highest.

– From Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1916)

Friday, Apr. 7, 2006
Posted: 8:06:16AM EST

COLUMBUS (AP) – A group of religious leaders filed a second complaint Thursday with the IRS alleging improper political activity by two conservative churches on behalf of Republican candidate for governor Kenneth Blackwell.

More than 50 ministers, most of them liberal, signed the complaint against Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster in southeastern Ohio and World Harvest Church in suburban Columbus.

The complaint, similar to one filed Jan. 15 and signed by 31 ministers, alleges that the churches have continued their support of Blackwell since then.

“The churches have continued to organize and host political rallies featuring one, and only one, Ohio gubernatorial candidate — J. Kenneth Blackwell,” said the complaint drafted with the help of Marcus Owens, a former IRS lawyer.

The leaders want the IRS to investigate whether the churches are breaking federal election laws regarding political activities by nonprofits.

The complaint notes a report released by IRS commissioner Mark Everson in February that IRS exams found nearly three out of four churches, charities and other civic groups suspected of violating restraints on political activity in the 2004 election actually did so.

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Jeez, it’s been nearly a month since I posted Part 2 of this entry, with Part 3 still promised to come. Guess I’d better wrap this up.

When I left off, our membership class had just finished telling their spiritual autobiographies. It was 2:30 p.m.; we wanted to get downtown in time to hear Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church, engage in a dialogue about the appropriate role of evangelical Christians vis a vis electoral politics. The event was held at the Capitol Theatre. Admission was free, but you had to register online beforehand since the organizers expected the theatre to fill up completely. From what I could see it, it did not — it was maybe three-quarters full — but since the theatre has a 903-seat capacity you were still talking, say, 700 people. If you look at the photo and count about eight rows back on the right hand side as one would face the stage, that’s pretty much where I sat.

In the seat next to me on one side sat a member of my church. On the other side sat a complete stranger, who might have been a fan of Jim Wallis or who might have been in complete sympathy with Pastor Johnson’s Ohio Restoration Project. At first there was no way to know. For that matter, there was no way to know how many people in the theatre embraced the ORP’s philosophy and mission and how many found it troubling. I would have guessed that the ORP would have done sufficient “advance work,” to use a phrase from campaign politics, to pack the theatre with its supporters. But I turned out to be wrong. Once the dialogue got going and the audience began to respond to things that Wallis and Johnson were saying, it became evident that a majority of those present — including the neighbor on my left — found Wallis’s message far more resonant than Johnson’s.

(Continued)

From Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916); a favorite of mine since I was a kid:

You come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
people hope.
You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we’re all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.
I’ve read Jesus’ words. I know what he said. You don’t
throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I
know how much you know about Jesus.
He never came near clean people or dirty people but
they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your
crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers
hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out
of the running.
I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into
the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined
up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men
now lined up with you paying your way.This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened
good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful
from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands
wherever he passed along.
You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching
about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who
lived a clean life in Galilee.

When are you going to quit making the carpenters build
emergency hospitals for women and girls driven
crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about
Jesus — I put it to you again: Where do you get that
stuff; what do you know about Jesus?
Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash
a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance.
Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your
nutty head. If it wasn’t for the way you scare the
women and kids I’d feel sorry for you and pass the hat.
I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when
he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.
I like a man that’s got nerve and can pull off a great
original performance, but you — you’re only a bug-
house peddler of second-hand gospel — you’re only
shoving out a phoney imitation of the goods this
Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
up all right with them by giving them mansions in
the skies after they’re dead and the worms have
eaten ‘em.
You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need
is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without
having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of
age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross
and he’ll be all right.
You tell poor people they don’t need any more money
on pay day and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job,
Jesus’ll fix that up all right, all right — all they gotta
do is take Jesus the way you say.
I’m telling you Jesus wouldn’t stand for the stuff you’re
handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers
and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and
murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus
wouldn’t play their game. He didn’t sit in with
the big thieves.

I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.
I won’t take my religion from any man who never works
except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory
except the face of the woman on the American
silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you’re
pouring out the blood of your life.

I’ve been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha,
where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is
straight it was real blood ran from His hands and
the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red
drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed
in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

Yes, their insidious plot worked.

On Palm Sunday, I and several others became members of North Congregational United Church of Christ, an “open and affirming church” that is also Ground Zero for opposition to the Religious Right in Ohio — or, more precisely, the Religious Right’s pretensions to engaging in partisan politics with scarcely a nod toward the IRS regulations that bear upon (and mostly preclude) such activity. But then, what else could one expect from a Tenured Radical in one of our nation’s ivory towers?

That’s one of the great things about what passes nowadays for political and cultural discourse in this country. It is nothing but a huge grab bag of labels by which to exalt one’s own perspective while invalidating that of anyone with whom you happen to disagree. The same process involves creating narratives, tacit or overt, that accomplish the same objective. To the extent that being human involves having opinions, and to the extent that respecting a person involves respect for those opinions — not agreement, but respect — it is a vast mechanism for objectifying people as surely, if less lasciviously, as any pornographer.

In my case, the great irony of the conservative evangelicals who might now be appalled by my choice of religious community is that they had their chance, in spades, and blew it. I won’t rehearse the details here. I’ll simply say that if my present church is “open and affirming” toward gays and lesbians and pretty much everyone else, I have seen my share of churches that were “open and affirming” toward the catty, the bigoted, the smugly superior, and the blandly hard-hearted. I still think that to the extent you can overlook those defects, such churches have other virtues and therefore much to teach churches like mine. And vice versa. But I guess having a culture war is more fun and less work.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. — Psalm 139:14a

Fearfully and wonderfully made. You better believe it.

As I’ve made clear elsewhere, I have Bipolar Disorder, also called Manic Depressive illness. The condition was diagnosed when I was twenty-six. (Most likely, the onset of symptoms came nine years earlier.) I have never attempted to hide the disorder from friends and work associates and I have been “out of the closet” — in the sense acknowledging it to whoever stumbles upon my blog(s) — for about a year. The candor is a little uncomfortable at times but I’d feel craven if I did anything else. “If,” I’ve written, “a tenured professor cannot summon the modest courage required [to be upfront about having Bipolar Disorder], then I don’t know who could reasonably be asked.”

The condition is never far from my mind. But I’ve thought about it more than usual this week because I’ve encountered a student with the same diagnosis. This happens occasionally. Sometimes a student will simply tell me as much, in the course of explaining why they have missed class or may need to do so in the future. At other times, a student with Bipolar Disorder will have heard that I share their diagnosis and will make a point of looking me up.

(Continued)

I looked out across
The river today
I saw a city in the fog
And an old church tower
Where the seagulls play
Saw the sad shire horses
Walking home in the sodium light
Saw two priests on the ferry
October geese on a cold winter’s night
And all this time
The river flowed
Endlessly,
To the sea.

Two priests came round
Our house tonight
One young, one old,
To offer prayers for the dying,
To serve the final rite
One to learn, one to teach
Which way the cold wind blows
Fussing and flapping in priestly black
Like a murder of crows

And all this time
The river flowed
Endlessly,
To the sea.

If I had my way
I’d take a boat from the river
And I’d bury the old man
I’d bury him at sea

Blessed are the poor
For they shall inherit the earth
One is better to be poor
Than a fat man in the eye of a needle
As these words were spoken
I swear I hear the old man laughing
What good is a used up world,
And how could it be worth having?

And all this time
The river flowed
Endlessly,
To the sea.

All this time
The river flowed
Father, if Jesus exists,
Then how come he never lived here?
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah

Teachers told us
The Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple on the edge of the
Empire garrison town
They lived and they died
They prayed to their gods
But the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled
Till all that was left
Were the stones the workmen found

And all this time the river flowed
In the falling light of a northern sun
If I had my way
I’d take a boat from the river
Men go crazy in congregations
They only get better one by one
One by one
One by one, by one
One by one

I looked out across
The river today
I saw a city in the fog
And an old church tower
Where the seagulls play
Saw the sad shire horses
Walking home in the sodium light
Two priests on the ferry
October geese on a cold winter’s night

– Sting, “All This Time,” from The Soul Cages (1991)